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Twitter Is Losing Momentum and Money. "Maybe writing 140-character messages and reading them from strangers and friends isn't something that more than several hundred million people are ever going to want to do. " This is it for me. . . for the most part at least. . . Flagged And that's something they're never going to be able to fix. Facebook is for grandparents: What we need in a next-gen social network. Jonathan Saragossi is the founder of IM Creator, a free website builder, and AppSite, a tool for promoting mobile applications. Jonathan is also a UX and marketing consultant for major startups including Any.Do and Playscape. It’s time to move on. The feeling is becoming more and more significant with each passing day and it just keeps spreading. It’s just not it any more… we want something new, exciting, which can take us places we’ve never been. We want to be surprised again. We want a new, better social network.

Facebook may say its user base is growing, but original members from the last decade appear to be leaving in droves. This is inevitable. For inventions, it usually looks like this: Early adopters as shown in the Rogers’ bell curve This curve is missing something important – the two-way migration that happens over time. Facebook today doesn’t resemble a thriving, living metropolis – it’s more of a friendly neighborhood bar. The multiple expressive me Privacy issues? Mobile first. The rapid rise and fall of daily deal Web sites. A glimpse back at better times for Groupon, its IPO in Nov. 2011. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters) It was the company that was supposed to revolutionize local commerce.

Small businesses that had never really advertised were signing up en masse. Consumers lined up with paper vouchers in hand to get meals for half off. It spawned thousands of competitors looking to cash in on the daily deals craze. Investors salivated at the prospect of a company that some bankers thought would be worth more than $30 billion. Fast forward a few years and many merchants have related their horror stories with running Groupons. What happened? The value proposition of Groupon was literally too good to be true. The first dot-com bubble was driven in part by companies selling dollars for 50 cents. As a society, we’ve gotten used to Internet magic. So we weren’t suspicious when Groupon promised us half off things that we wanted to try.

But Groupon never was — and still isn’t — a technology company. YouTube Shoots Google In Foot | PageFair Blog. YouTube pre-roll ads are driving users to install adblocking software, which in turn is having devastating effects on independent publishers. Google, who last year earned 97% of their revenue from online advertising (over $32 billion) has a product that drives people to block ads. Crazy, right? While Google may be able to reduce the impact of adblocking, many smaller publishers shut down or set up premium subscriptions to make up for lost ad revenue.

But according to AdBlock users, traditional advertising is not the problem- it’s intrusive advertising that they can’t stand. More-so, they’re fed up with pre-roll YouTube ads, especially when the video they’re trying to watch isn’t much longer than the ad itself. In a recent lively discussion on Reddit, these pre-roll ads were cited as the most frequent motivation for installing adblock.

Yep, Youtube is what killed it for me too. Users become annoyed with intrusive YouTube pre-roll ads, so they look for a solution. So what’s the solution? Vie privée: Facebook cherche à traquer les mouvements de votre souris. C'est un euphémisme de dire que Facebook ne se fait pas que des amis avec sa politique concernant la vie privée.

Mais le réseau social de Mark Zuckerberg semble vouloir accumuler encore plus de vos données personnelles. Après les photos, les statuts, les messages privés, et tant d'autres choses, Facebook chercherait maintenant à traquer les mouvements de votre souris lorsque vous consultez le réseau social. Selon le Wall Street Journal, qui a interrogé la semaine dernière Ken Rudin, chef analytique de Facebook, l'entreprise travaille à une "amélioration massive" du nombre de données collectées à propos des habitudes des utilisateurs. En clair, tout ce que vous faites avec votre souris quand vous êtes sur le site, mais aussi à quel moment vous ouvrez votre application Facebook sur votre smartphone.

Pour autant, ne lancez pas la fermeture de votre compte Facebook tout de suite. Shutterstock, un site de photos gratuites, utilise déjà ce système. Loading Slideshow. Facebook needs news organizations. And news organizations need Facebook. (Facebook) It didn't take very long for Twitter to become a hub for journalists and breaking news events. For better or for worse, so has Reddit — its crowd-sourced, real-time sleuthing tends to draw massive interest, even if it sometimes leads to tragic conclusions. Yet the same can't be said about Facebook, which for many is still a place for their personal lives. Even though Facebook has a dedicated page to help journalists source stories and promote their work there, it's hardly clear that readers prefer Facebook as a source of news. (Pew) Two-thirds of Americans are on Facebook. These numbers pose a challenge for Facebook — and a huge opportunity for the news outlet that can figure out how to turn the social network to its advantage.

Facebook Removing Option To Be Unsearchable By Name, Highlighting Lack Of Universal Privacy Controls. “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” Anyone you haven’t blocked. Facebook is removing this privacy setting, notifying those who had hidden themselves that they’ll be searchable. It deleted the option from those who hadn’t used it in December, and is starting to push everyone to use privacy controls on each type of content they share. But there’s no one-click opt out of Facebook search. To be fair, the “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” Feature was likely misunderstood by lots of people. With the roll out of Graph Search, the avenues for sniffing out someone’s profile grew exponentially. It also led people to think search was broken in some cases. Keeping this privacy option around gave people a false sense of security. Over the new few months, users who’ve employed the privacy setting to avoid being searched by name will see a big announcement at the top of their Facebook homepage explaining what’s happening.

One solution is to use a fake name. [Image] The End Of The Power User. A Quantum Leap for the Government in Mining Twitter Feeds. Last August, around fifty government employees and private contractors gathered at a Defense Department development laboratory in Crystal City, Virginia. The group began a nine-day experiment in which they collected intelligence solely by sifting through publicly available data sources—in particular, social media. Key to the plan, according to the After Action Report, was analyzing tweets. That week, the test scenario involved gathering intelligence for a money-laundering case.

Future weeks would, on a monthly basis, test the same data-mining methods on different scenarios like human trafficking, terrorism, and narcotics. The project, planned to last six months, was called Quantum Leap. The idea was for the researchers to comb through any publicly available data that they could—tweets, property information, business transactions—which do not require a warrant to collect or analyze. The Quantum Leap report also describes a monitoring tool, developed by a company eerily called Intrusion. Is Yelp A Bully Or Just Misunderstood. Facebook Now Lets You Rate Movies, TV, And Books To Turn Graph Search Into A GoodReads For Everything. For the first time, Facebook users can now give star ratings to movies, TV shows, and books.

That data could help Facebook show more relevant content and results in news feed and Graph Search. The feature comes alongside Facebook’s announcement that it’s finished rolling out “Sections” that show what apps you use. Sections let people express themselves and gives developers a new way to grow. Facebook first started testing the new Sections in mid-March as part of a redesigned Timeline with all user posts in the right column. Now all users have the cleaner looking Timeline with posts and Sections divided rather than mixed up.

Down the left column, each content type and app gets its own Section, which you can configure in your profile’s About tab. The Music Section displays what musicians you Like, the Spotify Section shows off what songs you’ve been listening to, and the OpenTable Section features restaurants you’ve favorited or recently ate at. Babbel.com. The crazy truth: Google+ can thrive alongside Facebook | Internet & Media. It's easy to call Facebook the social network of the past. It's harder to build the social network of the future. To hear Bradley Horowitz tell it, though, Google is well on its way. Google+, he says, lets people share with others in a more natural way than its competitors. Easy privacy controls, an environment free from obtrusive advertising, and highly polished mobile apps combine on Google+ to deliver a next-generation social network, as Horowitz tells it.

"It's not attempting to chase the social networks of the past," he said this week at a Business Insider conference in New York , in an assertion that launched a hundred headlines. The 15-minute interview with Google's vice president of product for Google+ showed off a refreshingly pugnacious side of a social network that's been rather quiet as of late -- and, in doing so, got the network its best press coverage in months.

Google+ is really two things. But Google+ plays a second role, as a product that improves other products. Facebook Gives Examples To Jumpstart Usage Of Graph Search, Which It May Have Spent Too Long Building. Photos and the news feed are where people spend their time on Facebook. Yet its last two big products were relatively niche features, Timeline and the new Graph Search. Facebook today published examples of how to use Graph Search, which merely highlight that it’s not part of day-to-day life. Yes, Facebook needed to fix search, but it may have prioritized an engineering wank over the user experience. As Facebook told me last week, Graph Search now has hundreds of thousands of users, up from the approximately 100,000 who first got the rollout (those without it can sign up for earlier access). The suggested queries include searching for videos or old photos of friends, who you know that’s engaged, and photos from popular news sources.

But look at that list. That’s a little worrisome, especially since it follows a trend. Timeline and Graph Search are necessary building blocks for telling your life’s story by uploading content and letting the world browse that information.

Investment

‘State’ Opinion Network Defines You By What You Think, Not How Famous You Are. State wants to democratize opinion sharing, and make Twitter and Wikipedia looks like elitist popularity contests. Led by Jawbone founder Alexander Asseily, State has raised $14 million and will launch later this year. Today it revealed details to TechCrunch about its strategy and investors, plus the first screenshots of its app that could help you change the world or just geek out.

“Opinions are the one thing everyone is qualified to give”, explains Asseily, State’s co-founder and Chairman. “On Wikiepedia, only experts can curate. If you’re on Twitter and you say something witty, it might retweeted, but that’s a bit of a crapshoot. State hopes to give a voice to everyone by combining the ease and short-form format of Twitter with the built-in audience of new blogging platforms like Medium and Quora Blogs. State plans to roll out with an invite-only beta this spring, and you can sign up here for early access. State’s got a big challenge ahead. The Future of Facebook as a Social Content Farm. In the lofty idealism of Facebook, the world's largest social network fosters basic human connections. It keeps you in touch with the people you care about. The number of friends you boast on Facebook is a direct measure of the richness of your social life.

"Chairs are for people," proclaims one earnest ad, "and that is why chairs are like Facebook. " Now, the company rhetoric, always tenuously connected to reality, is verging on fantasy. Content farms—long the scourge of Google searches, returning worthless junk for promising results—are migrating to Facebook. And they're sucking the humanity out of it. On Feb. 1, we introduced you to one. Maybe you haven't heard of a content farm. Despite seductive headlines, the articles invariably disappoint. Step 1: "Decide if you want to be a professional …. or an amateur. " To content farms, quality and utility aren't important. At the home site, quality takes a backseat to volume. And: "Technology devices are not so common among women. "Yes. " This Facebook page you like is actually spam.

Aly Monique spends her days studying nursing in Chicago, but at night she plays a stylist online. At the social-shopping site Polyvore, she creates fashionable ensembles with chic bags and cute designer dresses and sexy shoes. She has no training in the art of style, but the numbers prove her talent. Every time one of her sets gets posted to Facebook, tens of thousands of people like and share it. They gush with praise. They beg to know where they can buy every single item, right down to the accessories. But Monique is completely clueless of her popularity.

Her images are being stolen by a Facebook page called Dresses and shared with its 2.9 million followers—without permission and without credit. Every day, Facebook users talk about Dresses more than just about any other page on the social network. The page's success comes from stealing collages created by Monique, and others like her, and turning them into an endless stream of eye candy for style lovers.

But it's also spam. That's it. Facebook Publishes Super Nerdy Big Data Engineering Blog Post To Attract Hardcore Coders. 100 petabyte clusters! 60,000 hive queries a day! Facebook’s latest 1,800-word engineering blog post has one goal: proving to the world’s top programmers that if they want a challenge, they should work for the social network. There’s not much for the layman beyond that Facebook’s data warehouse is 2,500 times bigger than in 2008. This is back-end geek porn, and it’s critical to Facebook’s longterm success.

Facebook has the same talent retention problem as any tech startup that goes public. Without the massive upside of a little stock potentially being worth a lot of money one day, getting the best coders, designers, product visionaries, and biz whizzes to come aboard or not jump ship is tough. There’s the lure of founding a company and calling the shots. But Facebook has one thing young startups don’t have. The note details the limits of the Hadoop MapReduce scheduling framework, and how Facebook built its own version of Corona to surpass those limits. The Complete Facebook Success Formula Every Marketer Should Know.